Thanks BirdDancer.

It is one of those situations that is almost impossible to imagine unless you have been through it. I refused to talk to the psychiatrist who had been assigned to me because I thought he was part of a conspiracy to lock me away forever in a mental institution. Indeed I still think if I had told people what I was actually thinking I would have been locked up for even longer than I was.

I believed I was part of a conspiracy to take over the world and that my home had not only been bugged with spy cameras and microphones but people had the ability to make noises in my house including clicks and bangs. Sometimes I could not sleep because of all the banging.

It was after I came down a few months after being released that I realized I had been very ill and went on an antipsychotic. The police had banged down my door while I hid in a closet, they ransacked my house tossing papers and clothes and stuff on the floor. There were maybe a dozen officers who took me away. Once I was handcuffed one officer squeezed my upper arm with his thumb and left a big bruise.

I was doing dangerous things and my paranoia had only escalated when the police car had chased me on a road the day before I was arrested. The police had been knocking on my door and shouting out my name dozens of times for months before that.

As I became more and more paranoid I started to do more and more destructive things and broke the law many times.

Paranoid psychoses can be very dangerous so it is right to take such people off the streets. The question is how to treat them.

I am not sure I would have become so ill if my neighbors hadn't been repeatedly calling the police to make so called 'wellness checks'. This amounted to armed men banging on my door sometimes many times a day shouting my name out loud. This just fed directly into my paranoia that the government of Canada was after me because i was part of a world wide conspiracy to take over the country.